Hoya File Photo Father Walsh walks with General Douglas MacArthur during his visit to Tokyo in 1947.

Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service is named after him, but few people seem to know much about Rev. Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., the Jesuit and Georgetown dean who spoke out openly against communism during the Cold War period.

Throughout the course of his career, founded the School of Foreign Service, lived briefly in Soviet Russia, published or delivered dozens of articles and speeches and came to be a well-respected foreign policy expert. But his one of his most important concerns was the “threat” of communism, and he is often presumed to have suggested the issue of communism to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, which the senator would later use in his infamous “witch-hunts” in the 1950s.

Walsh was born in 1885 in South Boston, the youngest of six children of Irish immigrants. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Georgetown and began teaching at the university in 1909. In 1918, he was appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

In Feb. 1919, at the age of 34, he founded the School of Foreign Service, “to assist in mobilizing the constructive thoughts and information that should serve as the mainspring for giving direction to national policy.” He then became the first Regent of the school.

Walter I. Giles, Associate Professor Emeritus in the Government Department, emphasizes the importance of the foundation of SFS in the introduction he wrote to the Footnotes to History: Selected Speeches and Writings of Edmund A. Walsh, S.J. According to Giles, before the foundation of the school, there were no majors in international relations, international law, foreign policy or diplomacy in the U.S.

Giles notes the predominant isolationist thinking in the U.S. at the time. “The U.S. diplomatic and consular service itself, later to be reorganized as the Foreign Service of the U.S., had yet to develop a professionalized corps.”

Walsh, however, was well aware of the importance of international affairs. According to him, World War I had “dislodged [the Americans] from isolated ease and uprooted [them] from [their] parochial complacency.” Now they had to “think and act internationally.”

In Walsh’s lifetime, according to Giles, the SFS was tolerated, but not accepted by a number of Jesuits. They perceived the SFS as a “radical break with traditional principles [and] a worldly, nonreligious undergraduate institution.”

Walsh’s personality was also criticized in the Jesuit circles. It was unusual for a Catholic priest to be a political commentator. His concerns about international affairs were looked at negatively by other Jesuits as “worldly.”

A Soviet Menace?

Walsh not only had unique opinions about the international issues of his time, but he openly expressed them. From 1922 to 1923, he served as the director of Papal Relief Mission in the Soviet Union, an experience that shaped his interest toward the socialist republics, Marxism and communism in the following years.

In 1931, he delivered a talk called “Is There a Soviet enace?” on the airwaves of the National Broadcasting Company. During his talk, he explained the theory behind communism and what he saw as its goal: “communize the world or else destroy it.”

Then Walsh cited the Soviet Constitution to prove that this goal was not merely theoretical. The constitution read, “Since the formation of the Soviet Republics, the world has become divided into two camps, that of Capitalism and that of Socialism. [The first states that have joined the Union took] a decisive step towards the union of the toilers of all countries into a World Soviet Socialist Republic.”

In a 1950 article published in Washington’s The Sunday Star, Walsh returned to the same subject. This time, he quoted Lenin, who again emphasized the two camps. “We live . not only in a state but in a system of states, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable,” Lenin said. “In the end, either one or the other will conquer.”

After World War II, public opinion was relatively friendly toward the Soviet Union, which was then allied with U.S. and Great Britain against Nazi Germany. Walsh, however, never gave up his skepticism of the Soviet Union’s intentions. In the lecture he delivered to the League of Catholic Women in 1944, he criticized the “absurd contention that he who criticizes communism is giving aid and solace to Hitler.”

According to Walsh, the Soviet Union was determined to “exercise a gigantic regional influence and create a Pan-Slavic confederation in which the influence of communist ideology, if not directly imposed on all the units, would nevertheless enjoy free entry and full scope for the dissemination of Marxist materialism.”

In 1947, Father Walsh delivered an address to the graduates of the FBI National Police Academy. This time, he had solid examples to prove that his foresight of 1944 was true.

Walsh noted that Soviet power was exercised in Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, Yugoslavia, Albania, regions of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, North Korea, Mongolia and Manchuria either by “direct occupation or by indirect control.”

Meanwhile, he said, the communists were preparing the ground for communist domination in China, Greece, Italy, France, Palestine, Iran, South America and Afghanistan “by invitation, propaganda and by intrigue of the local communist bodies.”

Walsh had another foresight that would soon be proven true. In the same speech, he predicted that the Soviet Union would be producing atomic bombs “to match the strategic advantage of the American democracy” in five years.

By 1950, the USSR had indeedmanufactured nuclear weapons, and the question of pre-emptive strike had become an important one. In 1949, President Truman announced that he would authorize the use of atomic bombs if “the welfare of the United States and the democracies of the world [were] at stake.”

In an article entitled “Is it Immoral to Strike First if Attack is Imminent?” which appeared in The Sunday Star in 1950, Walsh addressed the issue of preemptive strikes. According to him, the government, whose obligation is to protect the lives of its citizens, would be committing suicide by waiting for the other country to strike first. Thus, a U.S. president would be morally justified to employ preemptive strikes – “defensive measures proportionate to the danger,” he called it – if the government believed that a similar attack were being planned and “ready to be launched” from any source.

Walsh also stipulated some crucial conditions that would legitimate a preemptive strike. Those conditions were “accuracy of information, honest information, competent information and an alert intelligent service.”

Walsh’s Political Influence

Walsh also shared his opinions with the U.S. administration. For a long while, he opposed the recognition of the Soviet Union by the U.S. In a lecture he delivered to the Industrial College of Armed Forces, he recalled an incident involving him and President Roosevelt. According to Walsh, on the day Roosevelt officially recognized Soviet Russia, he invited Walsh to the White House so the president could explain his decision.

Not only was Walsh influential on U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union, but he is also sometimes identified as the one who helped inspire Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against alleged communists within the Democratic Party and other sectors of American society.

A biography of the Senator, McCarthy, by Roy Cohn, presents the “oft-told version” of the story. Cohn was appointed as chief counsel to the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate by McCarthy; at the time, McCarthy was the Chairman of the Committee.

According to Cohn’s book, McCarthy met with William A. Roberts, a Washington attorney; Professor Charles H. Kraus, a political science professor at Georgetown University; and Walsh, at the Colony Restaurant in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the meeting was to help McCarthy find an issue on which to base his 1952 re-election campaign. After several ideas were rejected by cCarthy, Walsh suggested a campaign against “Soviet imperialism’s threat to the U.S.”

McCarthy liked the idea, and less than a month later, made a speech in Wheeling, West Va., announcing that he had a list of communist officials working in the State Department.

Cohn is convinced, however, that McCarthy did not get the idea from Walsh. In fact, he says, McCarthy had received his list of alleged communists “a month or two earlier.”

Rev. Donald F. Crosby, S.J., in his book God, Church and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church 1950-1957, also questions the veracity of the story. People only believed the story because Catholicism “was known to have a special argument with communism,” and the notion of a priest giving McCarthy the idea of an anti-Soviet agenda seemed to make sense.

According to Walsh, Christianity did have a special argument with communism. In his speech to the FBI National Police Academy graduates, Walsh said, “the philosophy of total power for government clashed with the inherent postulates of Christianity demanding respect for the dignity of the human personality.”

Crosby writes that McCarthy was already making speeches against communism before the meeting with Walsh. He also points out that Walsh’s main interest was the threat of external communism, not communists working for the U.S. government.

However, Walsh did mention the alleged American communists in his 1931 speech, “Is There a Soviet Menace?” Walsh said that the Soviets were training members of the American Communist Party on “revolutionary tactics” at the Lenin School in oscow. He quoted Stalin, who stated that “It is necessary that the American Communist Party should be able to . take the lead in the coming class battles in America.”

Walsh died in 1956, too early to see the Cold War’s dramatic end in 1991. In any case, his characterization of the conflict with the world’s other superpower may have been inaccurate, suggests SFS Dean Robert L. Gallucci.

“Conceptualizing the threat from the Soviet Union as the contest between east and west” is inadequate, Gallucci said. “The divide is real, but there’s a lot of good reason for those who want to look for ways [to breach] that divide. I don’t have a simple way of conceptualizing,” he continues. “I’m not willing to try to do what so many others have spoken to – but I don’t think succeeded in doing – which is, neatly capturing the camps, as you call them, or the divides that create conflicts.”

But Walsh would prove more prescient in other areas. His School of Foreign Service – which had drawn some criticism at the time of its founding – is now considered the premier undergraduate institution in the country at which to study international relations.